Demetra, the bread oven
Built for the Station by V. Leac
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Siliștea Snagovului
A traditional oven in the garden is a place to celebrate the harvest, the beginning and end of seasons (as unpredictable as they have become), to gather people around its fire and fresh smell of baking bread, to provide food, stories and shelter.
Demeter is the sister of Grandpa Asimov, the oven that V. Leac built in 2016 in the Tranzit Garden in Bucharest. It was manufactured at the Station from bricks, clay and crashed glass bottles, with the bricks recycled from the surroundings and from the Station’s members, and with clay from a nearby village where everybody builds terracotta stoves.
A poet, a gardener, a cosmic imaginer and a craftsman, Leac has invoked the ancient goddess of the crops and the grains, merging her benevolence with the texture of materials that are coming also from the earth. Through a cold and rainy April, alone and together with others, he constructed not only an oven, but also a dream, that the Station could be a place of collective nourishment and gratitude.
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life is a collective project of a group of cultural workers, who, together with tranzit. ro, co-own and co-manage a plot of land in the village Silistea Snagovului. The Station aims, through an open, participative process of building and contextualization, to become a place for research and/of the living, situated in a post-development narrative and based on ecological and ethical principles.
A public workshop was organised with V. Leac during the construction of the oven, in the frame of the project ABC - Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture, co-funded by the European Union.
The workshop is organised in the frame of the project ABC – Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture. Building ecological institutions for culture. ABC is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
